Are we being taken for mugs?
Back in December our good friends at
Ofwat announced £7.1m of funding for CaSTco, the awkward acronym for the
equally awkwardly named Catchment Systems Thinking Cooperative. This month
the Wye & Usk Foundation (WUF) became the first catchment to be part of
the scheme that seeks ‘to revolutionise the way crucial data about England
and Wales’ water environment is gathered and shared, in particular on the
health of the nation’s rivers.’
In the press release the WUF talk of
four pillars to the initiative with farm interventions to tackle pollution
at source, citizen science to collect and share data, monitoring the
most damaging pollutants such as flea treatments and data collection that
will be available for public consumption. The intent of CaSTco is, and I
quote,
“.. that by collaborating with the
Rivers’ Trusts, and the many other organisations involved in CaSTCo, we can
influence NRW, EA and government policy. We aim to rebuild trust and
increase confidence of local people, and through community involvement and
transparency inspire public value of rivers and water.”
My initial thought was wow, that is
great. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of dedicated river lovers spreading
out across the two nations to gather the evidence with which to cudgel
government to bring the water industry into line. But then I got angry.
Really? When did monitoring the
health of our rivers suddenly become our job? What exactly are Defra
(annual budget £4.6 billion), the Environment Agency (£1.65 billion),
Natural England (£261 million) and Ofwat (£31 million), with over 25,000
employees between them, exactly doing with six billion of our money and a
huge arsenal of regulatory and legislative weaponry?
Much though I admire those who have
thrown themselves into CaSTco it does feel to me that we are being taken
for mugs. It is no irony that the worse-than-hopeless Ofwat,
enablers-in-chief of the most egregious behaviour by the water companies,
are funding this scheme. It strikes me as perfect cover for them. I suspect
they secretly hope that the citizen science will eventually run out of
steam and, having bought themselves a few years of respite from criticism,
they will live to fight another day.
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